The Robert Boyle Work-diaries

The project to prepare an electronic edition of Boyle's manuscript 'work-diaries', generously funded by the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine, has now been completed. For more on the project and the work-diaries themselves, see "Boyle on the Web" and the article, "The Work-diaries of Robert Boyle: a newly discovered source and its Internet publication", Notes and Records of the Royal Society 55 (September 2001), pp. 373-90. Searchable versions of the work-diary transcripts are now available at the digital library of the Perseus Project. Alternatively, visitors can visit the Boyle Project's own version of the files, as found below. At the moment, the Project has a separate technical website, which contains the XML versions of the files, as well as the project's DTD, entity lists, XSL stylesheets and other material involved in the development and presentation of these transcriptions. The transcripts of the work-diaries, listed below, are provided both in 'normalized' and 'diplomatic' versions. Normalized texts are easily readable versions of the transcriptions, where details of the sometimes complicated revisions the texts have undergone are not noted. The diplomatic versions provide in-line notes on the insertions, deletions and alterations in the text. Links are provided between the corresponding texts. In the normalized version, for example, the place where a deletion is located is marked by a small 'd' in square brackets. Clicking on that 'd' takes you to the relevant place in the text of the diplomatic version, where the content of that deletion is provided. Simply clicking on that word (which is not in a seprate colour in the diplomatic version) takes you back to the corresponding location in the normalized version. The work-diaries and other material presently available for viewing are:

For comments, contact Prof. Michael Hunter, Dept. of History, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX (e-mail: m.hunter@bbk.ac.uk.)
For comments on Web site and XML preparation of the work-diaries, contact c.littleton@bbk.ac.uk

Last modified: Wed May 08 14:53:50 GMT Daylight Time 2002